April 17, 2019 - 11:43
I really enjoyed Carmen Papalia's piece about access in museums. What stuck out about his piece is that his goal does not seem to be to take an existing model of museums and make it accessible to a larger population, but to entirely rethink the concept of museums and what they are for. Rather than taking an institution which is designed for nondisabled and priveleged people and making slight adjustments to it, he instead thinks about museums from an entirely new perspective. I really appreciated this because I feel like that mindset is really important to the field of disability studies - not taking what already exists and making it accessible but starting from a perspective of what would work best for disabled people. This willingness to upend convention and abandon what is in place for something that could actually work better is not present in many people, and it seems like an important way to solve problems in many areas.